October 2, 2007

My hand made book – step 2

More of my rambling thoughts about private publishing (I think that private publishing sounds much better than self-publishing, but if I am using this in the wrong sense, let me know) my limited edition portfolio book for Bad Trip – Sad Trip (here on known as the LE book). Also, for a private publishing, I do not need to get all of the book ISBN numbers etc as this is not going to be sold in your neighboorhood book store. Keep this simple, eh?

For the image layout examples, I am looking mostly at the recent Sexton and Barnbaum hard cover books. If you have some alternative suggestions, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Why I am choosing them is that they booth have that classical look, which suits me just fine. I don’t like images that go through the gutter (middle of book) and extend on both sides of the spread. I also do not like images bleeding off the page, as I always wonder, what does the full image look like, becuse you have trim something to get that bleed.

So I have done a what-if with some potential image pairing to see what might work. Yep, the prints are still lying on the living room floor, which is easy with the kids grown and away. Anyhow, just a very quick pairing and now half of the image have mates. I just need to let them rest together for a while and see if they still work for me. I have a feeling that they are all going to get moved around a bunch, if nothing else, but to test the pairings.

I did a quick sanity check to see what 60 sheets (120 pages) would be in book thickness, as I should pity the binder guy and not make this an impossible task. So the paper for Sexton’s book is 0.008″ thick and the overall sheet thickness of the book (with out the covers) is 0.60″. When I check the EEM, it is a 192 gm and 0.01″ thick, pretty close to Sexton’s, thus my 60 sheets would give me about the same thickness, 0.60″. His sheet count is greater, which is why his 0.008″ thick page is ending up with a 0.60″ thick book.

The Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Duo is 310 gm and about 0.03″ thick, which means for the same amount of pages, it will be 3x thick, which is whopping 1.80″ thick. Yikes, thats getting pretty thick and heavy. Since the Moab Entranta is a dual sided at 190 gm, I am guessing that its going to be in the 0.01″ thick like the EEM. A 0.60″ thick book seems very feasible which allows me to print one image per two pages, or one image per spread. Nice to have options;- )